


Whatever it Takes

by FireSoul



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Sibling Love, Tarazi siblings, Zari 1.0, Zari 2.0
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:47:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26242894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireSoul/pseuds/FireSoul
Summary: Zari and Behrad have been thinking about Zari. Specifically the version of Zari who changed the timeline to save the future and is now bound to the totem, unable to have a place in the new timeline. She may have accepted her fate, but they haven't.
Relationships: John Constantine/Zari Tomaz | Zari Tarazi, Nate Heywood/Zari Tomaz | Zari Tarazi, Zari Tomaz | Zari Tarazi & Zari Tomaz | Zari Tarazi
Comments: 19
Kudos: 62





	1. Chapter 1

Zari’s eyes open slowly despite the rush the nightmare. It wasn’t a conventional nightmare. There were no demons or monsters chasing her, no wardrobe malfunctions at some hugely broadcasted event. Actually while the dream had been happening it had been nice. It had been her, Behrad, and the other her. The rest of the team had been there too. They were all on some kind of mission but she hadn’t focused much on that. All she had really been interested in was herself and Zari, and Behrad, and then Nate and John because they were there too and both her and Zari were happy.

She rolls over as the dream starts to fade from her memory. John is next to her, sleeping soundly. She watches him for a long moment, taking comfort in the fact that she gets to open her eyes to him. She is still here.

But Zari isn’t.

Zari, other Zari she means, doesn’t get to wake up in the middle of the night to see Nate snoring softly beside her. She doesn’t get to wake up to her world still being in tact, to her brother being just down the hall. She doesn’t get anything. She gets the totem. She gets to be an outsider in her own life. Worse than that, she doesn’t get her own life anymore. Instead she gets to sit by and know that Zari, someone else, is living her life in her place.

It isn’t fair.

Slowly, she moves to sit heavily on the edge of the bed, debating for a moment if she is going to get up or if she is going to lie back down to sleep. It’s really no question at all.

She tiptoes quietly out of the room and down the hall, hoping that maybe some tea might help her sleep. It won’t but she figures it’s worth a shot. The galley is dark when she arrives, save for the low blue lights that glow between the far wall panels.

“Gidget.” She whispers, “Lights at 15% please.”

The lights come up to a soft glow without a word from Gidget, and absentmindedly Zari wonders if she’s in a sleep mode of some sort and is too tired to respond, or if something as simple as lights at this hour just isn’t worthy of a commentary. It’s just as well; she isn’t in the mood for an inquiry over what she is doing up.

She often appreciates the replicator and how it is able to make her favorite tea just right and at the perfect temperature. But tonight she would rather brew it herself. So she retrieves the kettle and her tea leaves from their hiding places and once the water is boiling she has nothing to do but wait and lose herself in the silence of the late hour.

Secretly, Zari has always enjoyed moments like this; in the middle of the night when they rest of the world is asleep and everything is quiet and peaceful. The only sound is that of the soft hum of the ship, soon to be joined by the boil of the water.

However, something else joins her in the near-silence first; footsteps.

They’re familiar footsteps; soft and light, and they move increasingly in a diagonal pattern the closer they get. She’s known those footsteps for most of her life, and sure enough Behrad comes around the corner and gives her a nod before going into the fridge.

“What are you doing up so late?” He asks, not a hint of sleep in his voice. He’s probably been playing video game since the mission ended five hours ago.

“Couldn’t sleep.” She murmurs, running her thumbs over the handle to her empty mug. Her brother cranes his head out of the refrigerator and looks at her with a furrowed brow of concern, before he closes the fridge altogether and comes to sit on the barstool across from her.

“Are you ok?”

“Yeah.” She says, quietly, with her eyes not quite meeting his. “I just… Sometimes, late at night, I can’t help thinking about her.”

She sees his eyes flicker, and his whole demeanor becomes more serious. His shoulders haunch, his fingers weave together atop the counter. He knows whom she’s talking about, she doesn’t have to say it. It’s been weeks since Zari exiled herself back into the totem and the two of them are still… processing. Maybe grieving is a better word, actually, since Zari feels she’s processed the situation as well as she thinks she is ever going to. It’s funny, she’s always thought of that day at Heyworld as the day that set her life on it’s course, but she never realized just _how_ different her life would’ve been without Heyworld. She would have been an entirely different person.

Zari is an entirely different person.

She is a person with her own feelings, and interests, and relationships.

“She doesn’t deserve this Behrad.” She says, and then the teakettle behind her starts to whistle loudly so she turns and takes it off the heat before it wakes up the whole ship.

“I know.” He sighs.

As Zari pours her tea she feels the weight of the kettle and realizes she’s made enough for a second cup. Whether or not she was intending on drinking that second cup she isn’t entirely sure, but she doesn’t think much of it. Instead she grabs a Darth Vader mug off the wrack and pours the remainder of the tea into it, handing it over to Behrad who accepts it with open hands.

“I’ve been trying to think of some loophole to get her back.” He confesses after taking a sip of the tea.

“Like what?” Zari asks around the edge of her own mug, preferring to blow on her drink first before she takes a sip. “It’s the most basic rule of time travel; two version of the same person can’t exist in one place. We saw what happens.”

“I know.” Behrad says, again. “But something about this is different.”

“How so?”

Behrad glances up at her.

“I don’t know if anyone’s told you, but, before either of us joined up the team fought these jerks who called themselves The Legion of Doom, real assholes. Anyway, the team lost, bad, except no one remembers how because technically it didn’t happen.”

“I’m not following.”

“A future version of the team who lost traveled back to the battle where it happened to stop it, and they did, so they all faded out of existence.”

Oh, of course, why didn’t she realize that?

Zari takes a minute to process all of that and what it means.

“Ok…” She eventually drawls, “I think I’m following, but how is it any different if those Legends faded away just like Zari?”

“Because Zari didn’t fade away.” Behrad’s voice near desperate, his mug clutched so tightly in his grasp Zari wonders if she should worry about it cracking. “The totem still remembers Zari. It still recognizes her as having been a master, how could it do that if she had faded into nothing?”

Zari frowns, trying to come up with an answer, but she can’t.

“And it isn’t just the totem.” Behrad adds, recapturing her attention.

“Gidget’s ghost data?” She asks, as he and Nate have been sure to mention that a number of times, and sure enough he nods.

“She was glitching after Heyworld.” He says, “Nate found a video file from Zari hidden deep in her hard drive. I didn’t know what I was doing, but in fixing her I was manually undoing things Zari had worked on. How is that possible if she never existed to do the work?”

Zari presses her mouth into a firm line, her mind racing with possibilities. Not possibilities that could potentially answer his question; she knows she doesn’t know half as much about temporal physics as he does. But possibilities that his questions are raising. If Zari’s touch on the timeline wasn’t entirely erased when Heyworld changed things than maybe, just maybe there’s hope for her.

“I think we need to ask someone else about this.”

* * *

Sara is used to being dragged out of bed at the most obnoxious times. It’s a reality she accepted long ago. Sometimes it’s a mission, sometimes its teammates; it really just depends on the day. Tonight it’s the Tarazi siblings, and while she usually tries to settle late night disputes in the hallway quickly, when they start asking her about the erased timeline she knows “quick” has just flown out the airlock. So, she leads the two of them to the parlor.

“Ok.” She says, taking a seat on the surface of her desk. “What is it you want to know?”

“The other me.” Zari specifies, stepping forward. “After the timeline changed there were still traces of her here on the ship, and the totem remembers her. If she didn’t exist-”

“She did exist.” Sara interrupts, blinking and trying to get her brain caught up. It’s weird, remembering two timelines, but she’s dealt with stranger. “Not in the current timeline, but the temporal zone is a place outside of the timeline.”

She pauses, watching their expressions to make sure she hasn’t lost them.

“We had a plan.” She continues with a sigh. “Zari was supposed to stay in the temporal zone while the new timeline set, that way she would be safe from being erased. But then Nate died, and she had to save him.”

Sara looks to her lap, her feet swinging lightly over the desk’s edge. She wonders, sometimes, if the song circle that took place at Heyworld would’ve happened had Zari stayed put. She tells herself it wouldn’t have, even if she has no idea who or what started it from the other side (though she has her suspicions). It’s easier to live with if she tells herself Zari was the deciding factor, that way her sacrifice wasn’t in vain.

“Would that have worked?” Behrad asks, “She still would’ve been from another timeline. When she was out of the totem I started dying because of the whole two timelines thing.”

Sara heaves a long sigh. Truth be told that plan had very much been the type they thought up as they were going.

“I don’t know.” She says, “We knew there would be another her out there.” She nods to Zari, “That was what we were more concerned with in terms of her. I think it would’ve worked, because she wouldn’t have been in the timeline when it set. When she came out of the totem and the new timeline set she was out in the field, with us. The timeline wasn’t able to recognize which Zari belonged to it and, as a result, whether Behrad was supposed to be alive or not.”

“But if she had stayed on the ship in Heyworld and then joined the timeline…” Zari drawls, her finger wagging as she puts the pieces together. “Then, as far as the timeline would’ve been concerned, she would’ve been a new person?”

Sara nods, “That was the idea. Again, we hadn’t thought too much about you, but we knew you would exist. It was just going to be a bridge we would cross later.”

Much later, after getting Ray back, defeating the evil fairy godmother, making the future not an anti-metahuman dystopia. Really, they’d had a lot going on at the time.

She waits a moment, but Zari and Behrad are looking at each other, and neither of them looks as though they’re going to ask another question.

“Look guys.” She says, pushing herself off the desk and back to her feet. “I wish we could’ve saved Zari too, but we missed our window. What’s done is done, ok?”

They both nod to her, but she gets the feeling it isn’t ok and the two of them are still going to be up thinking about all this. Still, there’s nothing more she can do, so she simply bids them goodnight and encourages them to get some sleep before leaving them in the parlor.

* * *

Sara says to get some sleep, but how are they supposed to do that? Behrad has been trying, very, very hard over the past few weeks to not dwell on the other Zari and how she essentially sacrificed herself for him. It doesn’t always work, in fact almost never. But now that he knows his Zari has also been thinking about her and he knows there was once a chance that the three of them could have coexisted without the timeline killing one or more of them…

He isn’t going to be getting any sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the formatting difference. For whatever reason my format won't copy over from my word doc like it did last time.

Behrad doesn’t sleep that night, not even after Zari has gone off to bed. He doesn’t sleep the next night either, and by the day after he is sufficiently distracted at every waking moment. It’s like Zari busted open a dam in his mind, which he had been using to hold back all his grief over her other self. True, he’d been thinking about trying to free the other Zari long before their late-night conversation, but hearing that he isn’t the only one thinking constantly about how unfair it is put him into overdrive. He wishes he could ask Nate for help, they always come up with their best ideas for solving the impossible together. But he can’t drag Nate down that road. He can’t dangle some tiny scrap of desperate hope in front of him, because if they can’t figure anything out Behrad isn’t sure his buddy can take losing Zari a second time.

He isn’t sure he can take losing her a second time.

So he pours over everything. He checks, double checks, and even triple checks the timeline for any weak points he might be able to exploit. Specifically he keeps going back to Heyworld. That was where the timeline changed, there must be a weak point somewhere. But he can’t find one. He even goes so far as to comb over the video of Nate’s death, multiple times, but there isn’t the slightest hint of evidence that Zari might have been there at one point. There’s just him, standing next to Mick until Constantine gives up the smokescreen.

The smokescreen.

Suddenly his entire body freezes and his mind starts racing. He… He has an idea. Not an idea for how to fix this – yet - but an idea about the phantom data he scrubbed and how it might have been able to exist in the first place.

It’s barely a moment before he’s on his feet and hurrying towards the lab. He takes a quick detour down the hall of the barracks and stops only long enough to knock on Zari’s door.

“I need you and John in the lab, now.”

He doesn’t wait long enough for an answer, he just hopes they’re in there and he keeps moving. He gets to the lab and finds it blessedly empty, though ever since Ray left it usually is. He pulls out the clear whiteboard, uncaps the purple marker, and is finishing up his drawing of two separate timelines when he hears hurried footsteps coming to a halt behind him.

“What’s going on?” Zari asks as he turns around, but he looks past her and sets his sights firmly on John.

“Do you remember this mess?” He asks, pointing to the second timeline he’s drawn out, which has a jumbled series of bubbles, arrows, and squiggles surrounding it to detail the many, many times John tried to make it so he never met Desmond.

When he realizes that’s what the chart is, he scowls.

“More or less.” He sneers, “Most of what I remember is a bloody headache, but I remember it twice.” He looks at Behrad like he’s confirming he knows that’s what he’s looking for. “Once with you, once with the other version of her.”

Behrad nods, “You created a lot of paradoxes.” He recounts, “The timeline was unstable.”

John nods, and puts his hands on his hips. “So?”

Behrad points now to the first timeline he has on the board and grabs the red marker, drawing a new timeline directly underneath it and stopping at the point where he’s marked Heyworld, going over that mark with a red circle.

“This is the original Zari’s timeline.” He says, pointing with now capped marker to the new line, and then to the purple one. “This is our timeline, and in it even before Charlie’s weird TV world restored our memories of the first timeline Nate, Zari, and even Gideon had some memories of it. Why? Because, just like all of the messed up timelines you created, our timeline wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“Yeah but it did.” Zari says, “Zari made it happen.”

“Exactly.” Behrad says, pointing to her with his marker, and the look his sister is giving him is one that warns she thinks he has lost his mind.

Oh well.

“Zari made it happen.” He repeats, “Therefor she needs to have existed, which the totem recognizes. So what if her timeline was never really erased? What if our timeline was just sort of placed over hers?”

“Like a filter?” Zari asks, and Behrad shrugs.

“I was thinking more like a smokescreen.”

Zari looks thoughtful, but having said it aloud he knows he’s right, and he can’t keep from grinning. It’s the only way the phantom data could exist, and the totem could remember Zari. She was here. Her timeline was here. They just have to find it.

“Ok.” John says, “I think I’m following. Her timeline’s still there, and that’s messed a bit with our timeline. That’s a problem, but you two do realize that in order to fix it you’d have to bloody erase either her or you altogether right?”

“Then we don’t fix it.” Zari says, voice thoughtful, and Behrad finds himself going from wanting to tell John to shove it, to wanting to know where his sister is going with this.

She comes towards the whiteboard and Behrad hands over his marker, but instead of taking it she puts it down and picks up a blue one. She places the tip at the beginning of each line he’s drawn and draws two more, backwards, and connects them.

“These timelines started the same, so if instead of going back and stopping Zari from disappearing, what if we bring her…” She takes the red marker, uncaps it, and draws a long arching arrow from the circled _Heyworld_ to the end of his two lines, makes a poignant dot, and then switches back to the blue marker for a new line. “Here?”

“We merge the timelines.” Behrad breathes, and Zari smiles, pleased with herself.

“What are you guys doing?”

Behrad feels his own smile fall. He looks out, and there’s Nate, having just walked in and is staring at the three of them; particularly him and Zari standing in front of the whiteboard with so many timelines mapped out.

“Um…” He stutters, and he feels Zari looking to him, silently asking what they should say, as if he has any idea.

Of course, his silence speaks volumes, and Nate steps forward and when he reaches them all Behrad can do is step out of his way.

“They think they’ve figured out how to save your girlfriend mate.”

Behrad wants to glare at John, and briefly he does, but he’s more concerned with how Nate will take that. When he looks Nate has this expression of _very_ hesitant hope.

“She dented time.” He says, still watching Nate carefully for a reaction. “She had to exist to do that, which means her timeline still exists underneath this one. We just have to find the entry point. We find that, we bring her here-”

“And the past year still happens as it did so that we don’t screw up time anymore.” Nate finishes for him and Behrad finds himself smiling. “Ok, I’m in.”

With that Nate turns his attention fully to the board and starts studying the array of timelines he and Zari have mapped out.

“I figure the entrance has to be somewhere in Heyworld.” Behrad says, “I have no idea where, cause I’ve gone over every inch of Gideon’s files but it’s got to be there.”

Nate hums, and puts a finger to the board, gently tracing an invisible line backwards from the Heyworld point.

“It could be before Heyworld.” He mutters, “Something she did the new timeline couldn’t reconcile with-”

He stops, trailing off with his attention now on Zari, who notices and raises an eyebrow.

“Yes?”

“Mithra.”

Yeah… That doesn’t really clear things up.

Except, Nate now has that look on his face that he gets when the pieces of a puzzle are clicking together in his mind.

“The dragon egg.” He supplies, “You just found it in your house right?”

“Yeah…” Zari drawls, and then at the same time the realization hits him Behrad can see it overtaking his sister’s face. “Wait, you mean Zari-?”

Nate nods, very quickly.

“Sara and Ava made a bet on when me and Zari would get together, so they sent us on a mission to set us up, which we thought was fake but it turned out to be a real mission and we got the dragon egg. Zari was watching it in the first timeline when we went to D.C. and she forgot it after she was hiding out in your house.”

Behrad wants to make a comment about the set up, and ordinarily he would, but the meaning behind it is dawning on him. This team never found a dragon egg, because there was no set up, and furthermore he couldn’t find his family’s old house in DC if he tried. He didn’t hide there before the Heyworld mission, he hid behind a dumpster. But the egg still got to 2019 D.C. and onto his family’s kitchen table.

While he’s processing all this Nate hurriedly grabs the red marker and draws a line from the first timeline into the second, intersecting them just before the Heyworld label and drawing an X.

“That’s where the timelines meet.” Behrad gasps, “That’s our entry point.”

Nate nods; smiling bright, and Behrad can feel his own expression matching.

“Sorry to burst your bubble mates.” John’s voice suddenly interrupts, “But do the three of you realize what you’re talking about? If you get even one part of this wrong-”

“We have to try.” Zari firmly interrupts him. “She gave up everything for us. We have to try.”

John scowls, Behrad can tell he wants to argue further, but he won’t. Even the ever-stubborn John Constantine can see there won’t be any talking them out of this.

Now they just need the plan.


	3. Chapter 3

“I still don’t like this idea.” John says as Zari finishes wiping off her make-up.

“It’ll be fine.”

She knows she hasn’t convinced him. She can hear it in the hollow sigh and the slight drag of his footsteps as he approaches her from behind. She keeps her eyes ahead though, set on her reflection as she picks up her curling iron. Nate managed to describe for her what Zari’s hair looked like that day, as well as use Gidget to fabricate the clothes.

John comes into view in the mirror, his face more sullen than usual.

It is enough to make her feel guilty, but she steels herself anyway and goes about setting her hair into loose waves.

“It’ll be fine.” She promises him and he scoffs.

“You’re risking your existence.”

She hums, and she knows he has another card up his sleeve; Behrad. He’ll tell her Behrad is at risk here too, and he knows she doesn’t want to risk her brother. But this is bigger than Behrad, who is an adult and can decide for himself whether his existence is worth the risk. This is about Zari, who in the day she had to know her started to feel like a sister to her. She was – is – a sister to Behrad. She gave herself so he could live, so _they_ could live. What kind of siblings would they be if they found this chance and didn’t take it?

Maybe that’s why John doesn’t play that card.

He keeps watching her in the reflection of the mirror, his hands lingering ever so lightly on her waist the entire time she’s working. Once she’s done she turns off the curling iron and turns in his grip, reaching up to frame his face with her hands and rubbing her thumbs every so lightly over his cheek.

She takes a moment to feel the stubble of his face brushing under her thumbs. She tries to memorize the way it scrapes rough and prickly against her skin. She won’t need it memorized, she tries to tell herself that, but she isn’t convinced.

“I’ll see you later.” She promises, and she leans up on her toes and presses a chaste kiss to his lips.

He keeps the kiss light but his grip on her hips tightens when she tries pulling back.

“See that you do, Love.” He says, his gaze firm and dare she think it very telling, but no time to examine that now. She can do that later. There will be time later. For all of them.

This will work.

She nods to him, then slips from his grasp.

* * *

“Whoa.” Behrad says when Zari comes up to the loading dock, “You look… Almost exactly like her. Except for the highlights.”

“The tent will be dark.” She shrugs, “Now lets get out of here before Sara tries to stop us.”

“Too late.”

Oh crap.

Behrad looks past Zari as she turns around, and there’s Sara marching towards them. Internally he’s already cursing Nate. He has one job; don’t tell Sara. Of course it could have been John, in fact it’s every bit as likely as Nate. In either case it doesn’t matter much now, he still has Sara walking up with that look in her eye that she gets when things are coming dangerously close to flying off the rails and she’s desperate to reign them in before it’s too late.

“Sara.” Zari says as she approaches. “Don’t-”

“Are you guys insane?” She cuts Zari off. “Look, I know you two are still hurting over what happened with Zari. But jumping into a dead timeline isn’t the answer. It shouldn’t even be possible.”

“But it is possible.” Behrad reminds her, “She created a paradox, so we have a window to get to her timeline. We can save her. We have to try.”

She doesn’t look thrilled by his defense, at all, but eventually her tense shoulders deflate.

“Just be careful, ok?” She requests, “If the timeline is already unstable then the last thing we need is you two making it worse.”

Behrad smiles at Sara and clasps her on the arm while Zari opens up the jump ship behind him.

“Don’t worry Captain, we’ll make it home.”

“You better.” Sara says through a smirk, “All three of you.”

* * *

They touch down in the back of a little suburban house in Washington D.C. that before today Behrad has only seen in pictures. He brings the jump ship down easy, parking it along the edge of a fence dividing them from the yard of the neighbors.

“Ok,” He breathes out, “Now we just have to wait here until little you finds Mithra’s egg. Then we’ll be firmly in this timeline and we can jump to Heyworld, drop you, and I can go into the temporal zone of this timeline and find Zari.”

“Ok.” Zari nods, “How do we know when little me finds the egg?”

He shrugs, “I don’t know, you said you found it right when you got home from school?” She nods and he checks his watch, synched to the current time. “It’s almost four, so you should be-”

“There.”

He looks up at her exclamation, just in time to see Zari and Charlie coming out the back door and running through the yard. They watch as the two of them race to the edge of the fence and climb up and over, into the neighbors yard.

“Mom must have come home with me.”

Ok, that means they’re set, which also means their window into this timeline is closed. They can’t go back to their Waverider because now they exist at the point of entry to this timeline. The only way back now is to go forward.

“Ok,” Behrad sighs after waiting a minute, and he reaches for the controls again. “Lets go.”

* * *

The trip in the jump ship barely lasts a minute and they land in Heyworld on opening day. Zari had almost forgotten what it looked like on opening day; all shiny and new. It’s packed too, but she knows where to go.

“Give me your hoodie.”

Behrad just looks at her, obviously confused, and she rolls her eyes.

“The Legends have eyes all over this place, specifically Zari’s eyes based on what Sara told us. If any of them see me before Nate dies this entire mission blow up.”

She hasn’t even finished speaking and Behrad can’t get out of his sweatshirt fast enough. He hands it over and she slips it on, practically drowning in it, but that’s the point.

She looks to him before she goes, and she knows this isn’t supposed to be goodbye but if something goes wrong…

“You got your time courier?” He asks, and she nods, doing her best to shove her thoughts and fears back down where they belong.

“Ok.” He says, and she can see on his face he isn’t as confident as he’s pretending. “Remember, Nate said Zari disappeared right after he kissed her-”

“Don’t remind me that I have to kiss Nate.” She whines.

“Zari.”

“Right sorry.” She says, “I know, kiss Nate, pull back, and disappear in time for you to take my place.”

He nods and she forces a smile.

“See you back on the ship.”

She steps off with that, and she feels the gust of wind behind her as the cloaked jump ship takes off for the temporal zone. She puts up the hood of Behrad’s jacket and slips a hand into her pants pocket, fingering the edges of the time courier. She tries and keeps her focus on the warmth of the hoodie, and the worn edges of the sleeves. It’s real, and so long as it’s real then Behrad is ok. She just needs to hold onto that thought.

Walking through Heyworld feels a little surreal. This is hardly the first time she’s returned, but there really is nothing quite like opening day. The music playing over the speakers sounds louder, the kids seem to run from one attraction to the next faster, and there is definitely almost double the crowd that there normally is on a given day in Heyworld.

Oh, and the sounds of screams coming from the area, that’s something that you don’t normally hear from this part of the park.

She moves fast as she can, weaving her way through the crowd in a run towards the arena, and when she arrives it’s just in time to see little her jump into command of Mithra.

“Stop!” Little her shouts, and Zari pulls her hood even further over her face and glances around the room. The Legends are all scattered around the ring, mostly on the ground, with Sara directly behind little her and telling her to run. She can see her mother in the stands, watching from the corner with a foot in the ring like she’s about to attempt to stop her daughter.

“Mithra dance!” Little her commands, and Mithra does, and Zari can’t help but to smirk.

The victory is, however, short lived, and in the madness of Mithra eating the witch (who, according to Nate, was the fairy godmother before Nora.) Neron grabs the staff and opens up his Hell portal, which only leaves the team with one option.

* * *

“Nate?” It feels like a rock has dropped in her chest and she can’t remind herself to breathe. John dying, that hurt. That stopped her heart and brought tears to her eyes, but Nate? “No.” Zari whispers to herself, because she can’t handle that.

“Gideon take us to Heyworld.” She commands, rising to her feet before the despair can swallow her whole, or maybe it already has and she’s being reckless as a result. Oh well, she doesn’t care.

The timeline is on track to change; all she cares about now is getting Nate back.

“I must advise against that course of action.” Gideon says in an apologetic and yet almost scolding tone. “The change to your future is still in progress. If you leave the temporal zone your current memories won’t be safe.”

She knows that, but hearing it still turns her stomach. She doesn’t even know if she _can_ save Nate. If she doesn’t try she’ll never be able to forgive herself, but if she does try she’ll be gone, and who knows what she’ll become.

“Don’t go!”

The words aren’t from Gideon. They’re shouted from around the corner, in a voice she knows but can’t place. Then… Then she thinks maybe she’s the one who’s died, because the owner of the voice comes jogging into the office.

“Behrad?” She whispers, and the way he stop and his whole demeanor just seems to sink in and breathe, she doesn’t know if he is relieved or if he’s seeing in her expression how at a loss she is.

“Hey Zari.”

She gapes, her brain trying to boot back up and… Nate. She has to get to Nate. But Behrad… He’s here, how is here? Should he be here?

He steps towards her with a hand reached out, “I know this is a lot, but I need you to come with me.”

She whirls her head back to the monitor, and then back to Behrad.

“This works?” She asks dumbly, and he nods.

“Yeah, this works.” He confirms, “You change the future. I live, so do Mama and Baba. But you also go out there to save Nate, and you fade out of the timeline because of it.”

Of course she does.

She wants nothing more than to break down crying right here and now, and she does let a few tears slip out.

“That fine.” She manages through her tears and she starts to walk past him but he grabs her by the arm. Ordinarily she would shake off anyone trying to do that, but for him she stops, her whole body stiff, because his hand is real on her arm.

“It’s not.” He says, his gaze imploring. “In the new timeline there’s a version of you, but _you_ … Leaving that dragon egg created a paradox. _You_ still exist, but your trapped in the totem and this is the only way all three of us get to live. If you come with me now.”

She… That is a lot to process. She gets what he’s saying, and then there’s a sound coming from her monitor. Voices. Singing voices.

“Nate’s ok.” He promises her before she can ask. “You - the you from my timeline - she’s down there making sure of it.”

When she looks at him he actually laughs, and oh how she’s missed that.

“Don’t worry, she’s actually dating John. She’s just making sure the timeline stays on track.”

“Dating John?” She asks, “As in John Constantine?”

“Yeah it’s weird.” He comments, letting go of her arm. “Look, we don’t have a lot of time before your team gets back. I have my Waverider’s jump ship, please come with me.”

She feels frozen to her spot, her mind racing to process everything and her eyes wanting nothing more than to turn and look at the monitors, but they’re locked on Behrad.

Behrad, alive; swearing that Nate is going to be ok and pleading for her to follow him.

She nods, and a huge grin stretches across his face and the next thing Zari knows she is following him through the ship and to the loading dock where he parked his jump ship.

He pilots them away and explains a few key things about his timeline to her, though he also informs her that because she still exists in the totem with their ancestors she should get her own memories back once they’re at his version of the Waverider.

She’s too busy trying to wrap her head around the whole thing to ask how exactly he plans to do that.

They never leave the temporal zone, but eventually they come across The Waverider; his version of it.

“How..?” She trails off, and he’s smirking next to her.

“Your paradox.” He explains, and that’s all he offers her. He docks and, the second in which the ship clicks into place her brain assaults her with an onslaught of memories. The totem, the TV world, her other self, being on the ship for a day, Behrad slowly dying because they can’t both exist.

“Zari?”

Behrad.

She looks up, her hand tangled in her hair, clutching her head, and faintly she is aware that her totem bracelet has vanished from her wrist because there is only one now, on Behrad’s wrist.

“Behrad.”

He grins at her, and a part of her wants to smack that grin off his face. What was he thinking? Zari too, what was either of them thinking? They could’ve taken themselves right out of the timeline!  
She hugs him.

“You’re an idiot.” She murmurs and he chuckles against her shoulder, and then behind him the hatchway opens, and she sees her other self standing there, dressed identically to her.

“Oh thank Allah.” The other her breathes. “Sorry, I had to know if-”

She cuts her off. Detaching herself from Behrad and throwing herself into the other Zari’s arm.

“Thank you.” She cries against her shoulder. “Don’t ever do anything like that again, but thank you.”

Her alternate self laughs, squeezing her lightly.

“You’re welcome.” She says, and as she pulls away Zari catches sight of Nate standing behind her other self, watching them.

She moves from Zari and to Nate, letting his arms fall around her and locking her own around his neck.

He rocks with the force of her running into him, pressing a kiss to the top of her head and running one hand through her hair.

“I’m never letting you go again.” He murmurs into her hair and she chuckles against his chest.

“That’s fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ta da!!!


End file.
